Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [166]
As Gutowski describes it, “A Day at the Beach is the story of the relationship between an alcoholic and his little daughter. He tries to have an outing at the beach and promises his ex-wife that he will not drink. Of course he falls apart and gets blind drunk. We shot it in Denmark—on the beach and in Copenhagen. Peter spent about a week or two with us. We had a very good time. He was always in pursuit of amorous adventures, always in pursuit of being introduced to the woman of his life and, you know, always in love or falling in love. That was Peter.”
In an apparent attempt to make the film even more raw than its subject matter destined it to be, Hessera cast an unknown and inexperienced actor, Mark Burns, in the lead. Burns plays “Uncle Bernie,” so nicknamed because his estranged wife refuses to tell her daughter, Winnie (Beatrice Edney), that the abysmal drunkard is really her father. It’s a one-dimensional performance, the dimension being surliness.
Midway through the film, after a snack of three bottles of beer at a seaside cafe, Uncle Bernie leaves Winnie to fend for herself on the beach, in the rain, and staggers into a beachside trinket shop. He asks the proprietor for a shell. Peter Sellers’s face appears in sudden close-up. He’s wearing a white sweater and smart print ascot. His right shoulder is thrust forward. “Why don’t you come in and choose one,” he asks, toying with his earlobe.
Enter a grinning Graham Stark in a bright red shirt and print ascot; Peter’s unnamed character addresses Stark as “Pipi.” (The film’s credits cite “The Partners: A. Queen and Graham Stark.”) Peter tells Pipi to get some beer “while I keep this young man happy.” Biting his finger, he declares that Pipi “goes and ruins everything, always.”
Peter takes his sunglasses off and sucks on the earpiece. Pipi returns. “She wants three bottles and an opener,” he says, referring to Uncle Bernie. (By this point, Hessera has cut away to the little girl, who is now tangled up in fishing netting and screaming in terror, but Uncle Bernie is shopping for shells and cannot hear her.) Uncle Bernie tells off Pipi for ruining Peter’s life and leaves.
Bernie retrieves Winnie, who has somehow managed to extract herself from the netting, and they spend the rest of the day together, he drinking beer, she wandering around. The final scene occurs at night in an empty, cobblestoned town square. The bottomed-out Uncle Bernie staggers in, led by little Winnie, abruptly pitches forward, slams his head against the cobblestones, and croaks. The film’s last words belong to the wailing little Winnie: “Uncle Bernie!”
“It’s not good,” Polanski acknowledges. “The problem is, I’m afraid, the director, and also insufficient funds. But the main problem is the actor. You can’t watch a man playing a drunk for one-and-a-half hours unless he’s a really great actor and has some charisma. That guy had none.
“Other than that, I mean, the film. . . . If there had been a great performance. . . . The film is done well enough to work. What didn’t work was the casting. Simon was not a director, and, let’s face it, we were a little bit cavalier.”
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What Polanski doesn’t mention is that his work on A Day at the Beach was interrupted. He and Gutowski were in London when, in the early hours of Friday, August 8, 1969, some intruders creepy-crawled their way onto Polanski’s rented estate in the hills above Bel Air, shot a young man to death in the driveway, and then murdered everyone inside the house. The victims were Sharon Tate, who was only a few weeks away from giving birth to a son; Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojiciech Frykowski, and Steve Parent, the youth in the driveway. No motive, no mercy, no sense, no solace.
Gene Gutowski remembers: “Shortly after Sharon’s murder I flew with Polanski from London to California. His friends gathered around him. There was